The Tide Has Turned –More Jobs Coming Home than Leaving—Thanks to President Trump

Our friends at The Reshoring Initiative recently release a report which provided good news, and also points to the fact that President Donald Trump’s Buy American-Hire American pledge is increasing the number of jobs and foreign investment here in America.

In 2014 and 2015 parity was reached between offshoring and returning jobs, indicating that the net bleeding of manufacturing jobs to offshore had stopped. As of 2016, for the first time, probably since the 1970s, there was a net positive gain in U.S. jobs. The U.S. has gone from losing about 220,000 manufacturing jobs per year at the beginning of the last decade, to adding 30,000 jobs in 2016. Measured by our trade deficit, of about $500 billion/year, there are still 3 to 4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs offshore at current levels of U.S. productivity, representing a huge potential for U.S. economic growth.

The rate of job announcements accelerated in 2016, tying the 2014 record. Most of the increase occurred in November and December, following the election.

This report contains data on trends in U.S. reshoring and FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) by companies that have returned U.S. production or sourcing from offshore. The data is cumulative 2010 through 2016 and is for the U.S. only, unless otherwise noted.

The combined reshoring and related FDI trends increased, adding 77,000 jobs in 2016, with an additional 13,000 reported for the years 2010 thru 2015, bringing the total number of manufacturing jobs brought from offshore to over 338,000, since the manufacturing employment low of 2010.

Reshoring and FDI together were up over 10% in 2016, with much of the increase coming in November and December, presumably due to anticipation of greater U.S. competitiveness following the election. Similar to the last few years, FDI continued to exceed reshoring in terms of total jobs added, but reshoring increased at a higher rate than FDI from 2015 to 2016. Preliminary data from 2017 indicates similar trajectories, with an all-time high of reported jobs per month reported in January 2017.